I had basically no knowledge of evolutionary medicine before reading this book, so it’s safe to say I learned way more than I would be able to explain on this page. I have always wondered why heritable diseases are so prevalent in the world if natural selection is working to eradicate them. Before opening the pages to this book, I simply had never pondered what could be keeping these diseases around. It seems almost obvious that they would have had some benefit in an earlier time which led to their proliferation within the gene pool. I worked with diabetic children for a whole summer as a counselor at Camp Sweeney and thought I knew everything under the sun about diabetes…turns out I was wrong. I had never heard the hypothesis that diabetes may be beneficial to surviving in intensely cold climates, such as an Ice Age. I had never even heard of hemochromatosis before reading this book and had no clue the role that iron plays in the life of pathogens. I found I learned something new from almost all of the studies that were cited. I am not exaggerating when I say that reading this book has reinvigorated my love for learning for the sake of learning alone.
